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/signed
it really seems like you don't know what you're talking about night lords.
"supressing like in dawn of war 2" - have you ever heard of weapons that pin? or moral checks?

an example to how tactic help me win games:

i play dark eldar myself and sure they have an unforgiving army considering mistakes, but if you know what you're doing and if you know what your units are capable of then it doesn't matter. i've only lost one game and had one draw in 5th ed. all because i think about what i'm doing and don't hope for the dice to roll well for me or because i only think about not making mistakes.
i win alot because most of my enemies just stay static and don't react to what i am doing but rather do what they would have done in each other game.

i usually keep my whole army in reserve and try to go second.
like this i can avoid 2 rounds of enemy shooting. since i don't get all of my reserves and different ones each game i have to see what i get and use it the best way i can, anticipating what will be the most dangerous units for me in the next round and try to kill/criple them or engage them in close combat.

i think about where which unit will go to be in the best position.
i try to avoid the enemies fire as best as i can.
i positions my troops so that i got a good line of sight but still keep out of range/sight of most of the enemies guns.
i plan my shooting phase so that i still can kill whatever i was targeting even if i only hit with half the shoots i should have hit with.
i charge only if my units are superior to the enemy.

i won most of the games because i surprised the enemy with my deployment and outflanked him before he could react to my attack.
if you don't react to my attack than no luck or army list will save you.

Deadshane1 wrote:
@ Night lords- you're pretty wrong on several levels....

Wow, you've got 40k totally figured out then dont you? Or not, this statement is so incorrect I barely know how to address it. What I will say is that you've simplified the actual "game" to a level here that would make 40k so boring that nobody with a lick of intelligence would bother to play it in the first place. Target priority isnt NEARLY as simple as you put it....sure anti-tank units target tanks, what kind of naive statement is that? Which tank do you target however, which one poses the bigest threat to your most valuable unit...what might make a game winning move in the next two turns.

Geez, according to you, Chess must be the easiest game ever...regardless of your opponent. Congratulations on being smarter than anyone...ever.

It is obviously is simplification, but no where near the level of intellect that you suggest. Everything in 40k can be calculated (can that unit make it to the objective in the next two turns?). There is no fog of war, you see exactly where everything is and everything that your opponent can utilize (deep striking locations can easily be narrowed down to 1 or 2 critical locations).

I said nothing about chess, nor does anything I talked about relate to chess. There are no such things as melee or ranged units in chess. Why would you even bring it up?

Deadshane1 wrote: List building IS very important in 40k, as a matter of fact, its part of were some mistakes happen...so in an odd way, you've validated part of my post that you "disagree" with.

I disagreed with your assessment on 40k on the battlefield, in the very first sentence I believe. You were talking about your friend having a better list buy losing to battlefield tactics, no?

Deadshane1 wrote:
Of course bad luck plays a factor, but people dont lose game after game after game because they've got bad dice. Not unless their dice are imbalanced to land on 1's all the time...such a claim just isnt realistic. If a player is losing game after game...and blaming dice all the time...the problem lies with the player, not the dice.

Also, saying that you cannot adapt to opponents? That is amazingly wrong. What do you think a single build does during a tournement series. A space marine army might shoot against a hand to hand army like chaos Khorne, but totally shift gears against a gunline superior tau army and attempt to engage in HtH.

...thats called adapting to your opponent.

It doesnt matter if it doesnt happen game after game, Im talking about here and now the match Im playing in. Because of the luck element (combined with the extremely simplified gameplay), I may lose this match due to no control of my own.

As for adapting - I was clearly referring to set pieces. You cannot bring on other units to counter what your opponent has. You are stuck with what you have. There is limited adaptation - almost all of which should be done in the deployment, before the game even begins.

Deadshane1 wrote:
Not to be rude, but if you think Grey Knights are forgiving, and skimmer based Dark Eldar dont have an advantage over them in an objective mission...then you sir, have not a clue about 40k. Actually, your entire post is a testament to that fact.

I dont have a clue, yet you believe the individual tanks that are the grey knights are less forgiving than the brittle DE. Unless you seriously F up (even then with their incredible odds), youre not going to lose an entire game, as did your opponent you described in your own post because of one mistake.



I never said 40k doesnt take a bit of skill, I said it just takes very little on the battlefield. Most of the game is decided before the game even begins and in the dice rolls.

I also never said it wasnt entirely, or partly, his fault he lost, I was just disagreeing within your post that tactics will always (or usually) get you the win.


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sieek wrote:/signed
it really seems like you don't know what you're talking about night lords.
"supressing like in dawn of war 2" - have you ever heard of weapons that pin? or moral checks?

There is hardly enough pinning in the game, but thats not the point. Im talking about a far more micro management game with a new cover system and supressing tactics. Dont take my quote out of context.

Deadshane1 wrote:
Absolutly, dice DO happen...sometimes, but they dont happen enough so that you can blame every lost game on them.

...and you guys that are insisting that games happen all the time where someone rolls only 1's and their opponents are only rolling 6's?

Nope, I'm insisting nothing of the sort. Believe me or not, but I'm not even being argumentative. I'm trying to help you refine your argument through debate. You started with an absolute position: dice are never to blame for losing a game. Through discussion, your position has migrated to the (more reasonable) position that bad dice can't be blamed for every loss, a position I can certainly agree with.

Now, I don't know if you want to extend your "tactica" to cover the vagaries of dice or not. If you did, an exploration of "acceptable risk," from your highly-experienced perspective, would certainly be welcome. When do you accept a situation that requires average dice results? Do you bother worrying about standard deviations? Hell, do you bother with probabilities at all, or do you work from an intuitive experience-derived understanding of what a unit/model can do, or what damage it can absorb?

So, what people are saying is that yes, sometimes you get unlucky (or lucky,) but most of the time you lost (or won) because of the decisions you made.

Stunning!

...now if only I could figure out why I keep making such poor decisions. Sigh. :(

Lansirill:

No, some people are saying that you can manage the risks you take. So, yeah, you win or lose on the decisions you take rather than the dice rolls, but that's because you decide when and where those dice rolls happen!

Lansirill wrote:So, what people are saying is that yes, sometimes you get unlucky (or lucky,) but most of the time you lost (or won) because of the decisions you made.

Stunning!

...now if only I could figure out why I keep making such poor decisions. Sigh. :(

See, that's EXACTLY what I'd like this thread to go into. There is room for some very interesting discussion here. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that the thread began with that intent.

i think it would be reasonably to say that you just shouldn't put the whole game on one roll if you know what i mean.
"if i fail this save i lose, but if i make it i win."
if you compensate (in a reasonable manner) for bad luck than that should prove very helpfull. in this case you could compensate for bad rolls.
if you really fail all your rolls (and backup rolls) than there is nothing to do but i think that in maximal 5% of all games this is the case.

Let me give you a little example: If you are a good player---and you have bad luck it will look like this

Assaulting with a Bloodthirster a unit of 10 Tact squad SM or a Keeper of Secrets

This means-you will hit first uok : WS10 against WS4 -like 3+ I think as opsed to assaulting the Keeper of Secrets(I 10 WS 8)

They dice could go bad...BUT you allready made a mistake

If you have bad luck against the 10 men Tact squad: it will mean 6 attacks at 3+ and you hit only 3..maybe 2...
When you wound...you do it on a 2+ .... waht are the chances of giveing just 1-1-1-1-1-1 + no armour save

When the squad hits you-let's say you did only 1 wound
the squad hits at 5+ and wound at 6 AND you get a save of 3+ or 4+ if there are power weapons
In 10 dice...how many 5+ get you get..if you are really lucky??? 5??? uok 5... and from them if you are lucky? how many 6? ...uok 3... and from them how many 1 or 2 can I save?.....Very hard to think I will have one wound

SO my point is... IF you force the dice to bring you bad luck for exemple hitting on 5+ rather then 3+ ---it's not bad luck...it's bad choice

Plus IF YOU ARE CURSED...then DENY LOS,get out of range etc.

A good player makes his own luck

Eight Ball wrote:Deadshane, in everything you said, so true. I can't believe how many times I've seen people at the local GW playing, and losing, shrugging it off and saying "Oh, I just had some bad rolls", meanwhile, you can visibly SEE their horrible strategy, and they think they lost due to luck.

That said, I remember an epicly hilarious game: I was playing my Necrons, and I was 2 below phase out at the beginning of my WBBing, and I had 14 guys in various squads to WBB. I failed EVERY SINGLE WBB, and phased out. We had a good laugh about that one. But still, that is an incredibly unlikely situation, and claiming that that kind of stuff happens to you on a daily basis means you should either stop lying to yourself, or burn your dice and buy new ones. Yes, luck is a factor, but if it's the deciding factor in EVERY game you play, then there IS something wrong with the you the player.

Agreed.

It can never be denied that bad rolling can be a catastrophe for a single game.Today I Out flanked with a Deffkopta and moved him within 5 inches of a broadside squad of 3 with 2 drones. Missle killed a drone, Assaulted, Caused a single wound and not one wound was returned to the deffkopta. Leadership - 1 they failed....then proceeded to fail the sweeping advance roll as well. 45 point deffkopta over 200+point maxed out broadside squad / unit.

The game fell apart from that point on based on a single roll that; honostly, who would make a strategy around the fact you would nearly lose a 300 point unit to an angry ork on a nitros boosting big wheel with propellers.

As Redbeard said in a later post,
"Let's say that he didn't fail that leadership check. Ok, he lost a round of firing with that expensive broadside unit, and had to resort to trying to kill it in combat again (unlikely). You're blaming this failure on his dice, when in actual fact, whether the broadsides were killed or not is irrelevant, the ork would have tied them up in combat and denied them their shots. As such, the failure here was placement of the broadsides, putting them in a position where your outflanker could get to them in one turn. The dice merely made the mistake more harmful."

Nurglitch:

I hear ya during the night games we do weekly we have a bottle of choice liquor ie Jack Daniels Cpt Morgan etc. In the middle of a large complex area with a single token at the base of the bottle to represent the aquisition. Using small tactical teams with ambush, inflitrate stealth you have to retrive the token and make it to the extraction point. Whom ever escapes with the token gets the bottle.

When you put alchohal on the line with our group, it seriously draws out the Pattons and for our Ork players definatly some of the Captain. 3-5 Way weekly thing for a 20+30 dollar bottle of a choice drink.

Honostly this subject on luck vs strategy I can make an attempt to summarize by a famous qoute from a good read.

Command in War ~ Martin Van Creveld

"Finally, a most important point to be considered is that the revolutionary system of command employed by Napoleon was the outcome not of any technological advances as one might expect, but merely of superior organization and doctrine. The technical means at the emporor's disposal were not a whit more sophisticated than those of his opponents; he differed from them in that he possessed the daring and ingenuity needed to transcend the limits that technology had imposed on commanders for thousands of years. Whereas Napolean's opponents sought to maintain control and minimize uncertainty by keeping their forces closely concentrated, Napoleon chose the opposite way, reorganizing and decentralizing his army in such a way as to enable its parts to operate independently for a limited period of time and consequently tolerate a higher degree of uncertainty. Rather than allowing the technological means at hand to dictate the method of strategy and the functioning of command Napoleon made profitable the use of the very limitations imposed by the technology."

A book I would implore all warhammer players to read for enjoyment and application is The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. Excellent excellent read and honostly improved my warhammer game ten fold.

And to those who fight Napolean's remember he too eventually lost.


Side note on the passage: In our case the technology referred to is a metaphor for GW's gakky attempt at rules/codexs to control chaos.

I dont have to blame my dice- my opponents are usually the ones telling me how much my dice suck.

Ive even tried bribing cute young children to roll for me. Even with a snickers as trade I generally get the figner from lady luck

But, makin the most of the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' is what sets a good player apart. I can still win games even if my dice are bad.

And since I pretty much expect the worst possible rolls- I plan accordingly.

But I do agree with the OP.

Why waste time on excuses? Focus that energy away from ego and into something useful.

If you think you're a perfect player, and a loss wasnt your fault- pry your head out of your rectum (call AAA for a tow truck if its really wedged in there), and then study up on some Sun Tzu or something that might make you think past just the meta game aspects.

A good topic to read on this would be locus of control: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control

Its shown most during distress (see: losing) and in these cases a person with a high internal locus of control will look to change their own behavior to adjust the next outcome to their favor. While a person with high external locus of control will find a scapegoat, change little, and stay like this FOREVER.

This extends beyond just the tabletop and really might be why it ignites such a fire during discussion. I've typically found that this behavior on the table is mimicked in their off table lives as well. But that's just from the people I've met and really isn't a valid sample for discussion, just a thought.

This is a great thread. As for my two cents. I have to say that the person I find most complaining about bad dice is the good player. Well good playing in the sense the one that usually wins. It seems that for a lot of people, that the more you win the more you cannot come to grips that when beaten, it was because of your opponent or your own mistake.

So you go on blaming other things for your defeat. Even great players can learn once in a awhile and they should remember what it was like when they were not a very good player to begin with.

For those that are interested I posted on my blog a recent spat with Dakka's favorite booted step child, talking about this very issue.

http://bloodofkittens.com/?p=850

Well said Deadshane. Here's my take on it.

After a game, win or lose, I ask myself whether I performed optimally. Sometimes it's the fault of the dice, other times I make a bad call. I revisit the decisions (my batrep writing is usually performed during this time), and see whether I what I did was most likely to cause me to win, if winning was my intention in that game.

I've lost far more games due to playing errors than I have dice rolls. So have my foes.

Frenzied Potato wrote:
It can never be denied that bad rolling can be a catastrophe for a single game.Today I Out flanked with a Deffkopta and moved him within 5 inches of a broadside squad of 3 with 2 drones. Missle killed a drone, Assaulted, Caused a single wound and not one wound was returned to the deffkopta. Leadership - 1 they failed....then proceeded to fail the sweeping advance roll as well. 45 point deffkopta over 200+point maxed out broadside squad / unit.

The game fell apart from that point on based on a single roll that; honostly, who would make a strategy around the fact you would nearly lose a 300 point unit to an angry ork on a nitros boosting big wheel with propellers.

No, this is exactly what we're talking about. Let's say that he didn't fail that leadership check. Ok, he lost a round of firing with that expensive broadside unit, and had to resort to trying to kill it in combat again (unlikely). You're blaming this failure on his dice, when in actual fact, whether the broadsides were killed or not is irrelevant, the ork would have tied them up in combat and denied them their shots. As such, the failure here was placement of the broadsides, putting them in a position where your outflanker could get to them in one turn. The dice merely made the mistake more harmful.

40kenthusiast wrote:
After a game, win or lose, I ask myself whether I performed optimally. Sometimes it's the fault of the dice, other times I make a bad call. I revisit the decisions (my batrep writing is usually performed during this time), and see whether I what I did was most likely to cause me to win, if winning was my intention in that game.

I've lost far more games due to playing errors than I have dice rolls. So have my foes.

Indeed - and these are the questions that make better players. I still remember crucial mistakes from tournaments many years past.

Redbeard wrote:

Frenzied Potato wrote:
It can never be denied that bad rolling can be a catastrophe for a single game.Today I Out flanked with a Deffkopta and moved him within 5 inches of a broadside squad of 3 with 2 drones. Missle killed a drone, Assaulted, Caused a single wound and not one wound was returned to the deffkopta. Leadership - 1 they failed....then proceeded to fail the sweeping advance roll as well. 45 point deffkopta over 200+point maxed out broadside squad / unit.

The game fell apart from that point on based on a single roll that; honostly, who would make a strategy around the fact you would nearly lose a 300 point unit to an angry ork on a nitros boosting big wheel with propellers.

No, this is exactly what we're talking about. Let's say that he didn't fail that leadership check. Ok, he lost a round of firing with that expensive broadside unit, and had to resort to trying to kill it in combat again (unlikely). You're blaming this failure on his dice, when in actual fact, whether the broadsides were killed or not is irrelevant, the ork would have tied them up in combat and denied them their shots. As such, the failure here was placement of the broadsides, putting them in a position where your outflanker could get to them in one turn. The dice merely made the mistake more harmful.

40kenthusiast wrote:


After a game, win or lose, I ask myself whether I performed optimally. Sometimes it's the fault of the dice, other times I make a bad call. I revisit the decisions (my batrep writing is usually performed during this time), and see whether I what I did was most likely to cause me to win, if winning was my intention in that game.

I've lost far more games due to playing errors than I have dice rolls. So have my foes.

Indeed - and these are the questions that make better players. I still remember crucial mistakes from tournaments many years past.

Your correct I was agreeing that bad rolls happen but strategy takes priority. I just wrote it a lil awkwardly. I forgot a line which I'm editing in. You said it best so gonna add it as you wrote.

@Nurglitch: I think that it's not reasonable to base strategy and tactics around extremes of luck, either good or bad. There's a range of things that one can plan around, but there comes a point at which things get out of sorts.

For example, if you field Terminators, then one would reasonably expect them to make the bulk of their 2+ Saves, rather than for them to fail them all immediately. After all, the entire point of Terminators is that they have 2+ saves. If you weren't expecting them to make most of their saves, you probably wouldn't have taken them in the first place.

Similarly, if you take a unit with lots of PFs, one would reasonably expect them to do a lot of wounds against infantry. Expecting them not to kill anything once they actually engage in HtH would be strange.

Note that I'm not assuming or stating that Terminators should always pass exactly 5 out of 6, auto-failing 1 out 6. But assuming that reality will broadly conform to statistical expectation isn't too unreasonable.

JohnHwangDD:

Except I'm not suggesting that it's reasonable to base one's strategy around extremes of luck, any more than it's reasonable to base a strategy around the expected average. I'm saying that you should base a strategy around the expected value of each possible outcome.

For example, take the Terminators. They're unlikely to fail all of their saves on the turn that they come in. So take the likelihood of that event occurring, as well as the likelihoods of other events occurring (failing one, failing two, etc), multplied by the value of said events occurring, and act accordingly.

So yeah, I' not saying that you should expect the dice to roll strangely, I'm saying you should be prepared for however they roll.

OK, that's fair. Thanks for the clarification.